I rang the bell at the Kramer-Rothschild town house shortly before 7:30 P.M. Nan opened the door and I introduced her to Mike Chapman.

"We might as well go upstairs to my study. All the information about our project is there. I've lost my husband to a new client this evening. He's working late." We declined her offer of a drink and followed her up to the second floor.

"Could I trouble you for a television, ma'am?"

"Let's stop in the den first, then," she said, leading us around the corner and clicking on the set. "Something breaking on the news about your case?"

"No. Alex and I have a standing bet on the Final Jeopardy! question. It'll only take a few minutes."

We caught up on small talk while we waited for Mike to find the station and then for the commercial to end. Trebek was reminding the three players that tonight's category was Famous Firsts.

"Twenty bucks, Coop. Could be anything."

"Be generous, in the spirit of Christmas. Make it forty."

Trebek stepped aside and the answer was revealed on the screen. "First woman in America to receive a medical degree."

"I'm toast, blondie. I can never beat her on this feminist trivia, Nan. Probably right up your alley, too."

Neither Chapman nor the flight attendant from Wisconsin even ventured a guess. "Who was Elizabeth Blackwell?" I asked, before the Maine fisherwoman or the Virginia enologist gave their wrong answers.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, folks," Trebek said, chiding the three contestants for their failure to come up with the right answer. "Born in England, Elizabeth Blackwell immigrated to this country, and in 1849, she became the first woman in the United States to get a medical degree, at Geneva Medical College in New York. So let's see how much money that leaves-"

"The Blackwell family settled on Martha's Vineyard after that. Right near my place in Chilmark."

"Not a bad lead-in to my story," Nan said, as Mike clicked off the television and we walked down the hall to her home office. "This dig we're working at is over on Roosevelt Island. But it wasn't given that name until 1973. Before that it was Welfare Island, and in the period we're studying, it was called Blackwells Island. Different Blackwells, of course. This piece of land was owned by a colonial merchant named Robert Blackwell, whose family lived there in the 1680s. Their original wooden farmhouse is still standing."

"And before that," Mike interrupted, "the Dutch called it Hog Island. It was a pig farm in the early 1600s. Covered with swine."

"You two will be light-years ahead of me," I explained to Nan. "Mike knows more about American history than anyone I've ever met. The fact that he's familiar with the island probably means it had some significance in military life. That's his real specialty."

Nan shrugged her shoulders. "Not that I'm aware of."

Mike lifted a ruler from Nan's desk and pointed to the southern tip of Manhattan on the huge map of the city she had pinned to the wall. "In 1673, when the British and Dutch were still at war, the sheriff of New York was a guy named Manning. The Brits put him in charge of the fort down at this end, the entrance to New York Harbor. The Dutch launched a naval assault to regain control of what had once been their colony, New Amsterdam. Manning surrendered without a battle. So King Charles court-martialed the disgraced commander and banished him rather than put him to death." He moved the pointer up to a place in the East River, halfway between Manhattan and Queens. "He was exiled to your little island to live the rest of his life."

Nan responded, "It's always been a place for exiles. For outcasts. That's part of its tragic background. Do you know much about it?"

"Nothing at all. I look at it just about every day, on my way up and down the Drive. It can't be more than the length of a football field away from Manhattan, and yet I've never set foot there. When you see it at night, there's a hauntingly romantic look to it."

"It's got a wonderfully romantic aura, I agree with you completely. It's a bit like the He de la Cite, in the heart of Paris. A sliver of land, in a river, right in the midst of a great city. And a quiet, small-town pace that makes you think you're in a private enclave, not an urban neighborhood. It's even more dramatic from the heart of the island. You get to see the magnificent skyline of Manhattan from every angle, and then off to the other side, there's the industrial backdrop of Queens that lines the river's edge-factories, smokestacks, and barges.

"Let me tell you what the project is, and what Lola Dakota's involvement was with us."

Nan took the pointer from Mike's hand and began her description of the river-bound fragment of land. "The island is two miles long and just eight hundred feet wide. See? It parallels Manhattan from Eighty-fifth Street, on its northern tip, to Forty-eighth Street in the south. That lower border of land is directly opposite the United Nations. Great views.

"Today, it's got several high-rise residential structures, parks, two hospitals for the chronically ill, a tramway that connects it to Manhattan, and a footbridge that links it to Queens. But what fascinates some of us most are its bones."

"Skeletons?" Chapman asked.

"Not human ones. The remnants of the unusual buildings that dominated the landscape here a hundred years ago-well, almost two hundred years ago. As New York grew into a metropolis, it experienced all the social problems and ills that we connect with urban America today-crime, poverty, disease, mental illness. By 1800, the city fathers came up with the idea of walled institutions to confine the sources of trouble. The compound at Bellevue housed contagious yellow-fever patients and syphilitics, and Newgate Prison, in Greenwich Village, was home to rapists and highway robbers."

"My kind of town." Chapman was riveted.

"And did you know that 116th Street and Broadway was the original site of the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane?"

"A nuthouse, right where Columbia stands today?" Mike asked. "Now why doesn't that surprise me?"

"Then it occurred to these urban planners that they didn't need to use the valuable real estate of Manhattan to segregate their untouchables. There were a number of small islands that would relieve the growing city of its criminals and its crazies. So they looked to the river for property to acquire-to Wards and Randall Islands, to North and South Brother Islands, to Rikers and Hart Islands"-her pointer moved across the riverscape- "and the very first one the city purchased, in 1828, was Blackwells.

"From a bucolic family farm, the island was immediately transformed into a village of institutions. Enormous structures, forbidding and secure. A penitentiary, an almshouse for the poor, a charity hospital-"

"That wonderful Gothic building that you see from Manhattan? The one that looks like a castle?"

"No, Alex. That one came a bit later, for a different purpose. And then, of course, there's my pet. The Octagon-the lunatic asylum that was built to replace Bloomingdale's."

Nan walked to her desk chair and opened a drawer, removing from it an oversize notebook with sepia-toned blowups of old photographs. "The asylum was designed to be the largest in the country. It had arteries stretching out in every direction-one to house the most violent of the patients, another for females, a third for the foreign insane."

"Wasn't everyone a foreigner?" Mike asked.

"I think it's always the case, Detective, that some are more alien than others. Did you know that whenever an immigrant was found alone in the streets, unable to communicate because of the language barrier, our benign forefathers just placed him in the asylum until someone could make out what he was saying?